VL Betrayers and betrayed

[jbor at bigpond.com]

I guess. But the situations you describe aren't all that applicable to  
Frenesi. Or to Pynchon for that matter.

Alot of what she gets and where she gets to is dependent on her  
physical attractiveness (a bit like Weed Atman, the guy she murders,  
who had become leader of the student rebels by virtue of the fact that  
he's, uh, 'tall'. Now *that's* anarchy ...) But Frenesi's the ultimate  
pin-up girl.

And I tend to think that the depiction of 24fps as a collection of  
individuals is predominantly satiric as well, though Frenesi comes out  
of it better than almost all the others. (In fact, DL the lesbian  
ninja is a bit American manga ...)


Frenesi's life is well and truly on the skids when first we meet her.  
Springer-style, baby. She's a train wreck; and a lot of it's her own  
fault.

And yet, despite all the negatives, as a character she still is  
likeable and her actions are understandable. She is thoughtful and  
self-conscious, self-critical, to the extreme; Pynchon spent a lot of  
time getting into her head or getting it onto the page or whatever ...

Hers is a conflicted personality, or an attempt to represent one, and  
it is a substantial characterisation. The simulacra and DeLeuze &  
Guattari stuff resonates with and corresponds to the ways that we are  
made to apprehend and respond to Frenesi in the narrative, her roles,  
her duplicitousness both within the plot as a character and beyond it  
as the characterisation of a heroine ... her representations are  
nearly always mediated, immersed, saturated in the media, by the  
media, the medium ('light') ... anyway, we do get to read and see her  
as both a female consciousness and as a physical female presence.

Fre' Wheeler. I'd say a round character.

More so than Zoyd anyway. He'd best be played by a line-drawn  
animation .. o-or a young Tommy Chong in *The Frank Zappa Story (1969)*.

Ola


On 07/01/2009 pynchon-l-digest wrote:
>
>> she is a bit of a bimbo when we first meet her, living in a dump,
>> getting herself off to daytime tv, feeding the family frozen food,
>> trying to cash her benefit cheque at the local Kwik-E-Mart, etc.
>
> But these are the economic and social realities of Frenesi's life— and
> the lives of thousands, probably millions, of one-time radical
> activists—after the fall of social activism in the wake of the
> repression of the 70's and the curtailment of governmental programs in
> the 80's.  My father quit the scene by 1970, my mom continued to
> 'fight the good fight' through the 80's and 90's in large part because
> she no longer had a family to raise. Spending a week or two in the
> county slammer for social justice is a luxury that the head of a
> family of nine cannot afford.
>
> Of course, Fresesi getting all hot and bothered over CHiPs happens to
> be her own kink . . .

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